During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination ...and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called "the magic pilgrimage" to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West. Shining rare light on these efforts, The Ethnic Avant-Garde makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued "ethnic avant-garde." These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an "Afro-Cuban" voice; Langston Hughes's translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway's first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.
Winner of the American Comparative Literature Association's Rene Wellek Prize (2004)
As one of the founding poets and editors of the Language School of poetry and one of its central theorists, ...Barrett Watten has consistently challenged the boundaries of literature and art. In The Constructivist Moment, he offers a series of theoretically informed and textually sensitive readings that advance a revisionist account of the avant-garde through the methodologies of cultural studies. His major topics include American modernist and postmodern poetics, Soviet constructivist and post-Soviet literature and art, Fordism and Detroit techno—each proposed as exemplary of the social construction of aesthetic and cultural forms. His book is a full-scale attempt to place the linguistic turn of critical theory and the self-reflexive foregrounding of language by the avant-garde since the Russian Formalists in relation to the cultural politics of postcolonial studies, feminism, and race theory. As such, it will provide a crucial revisionist perspective within modernist and avant-garde studies.
The new avant-garde in Italy Picchione, John
The new avant-garde in Italy,
c2004, 20040730, 2004, 2014, 2004-01-01
eBook
The debate on literature and the arts provoked by the Italian neoavant-garde (neoavanguardia) is undoubtedly one of the most animated and controversial the country has witnessed from World War II to ...the present. Comprising the period between the late 1950s and the late 1960s, the phenomenon of theneoavanguardiainvolved key writers, critics, and artists, both as insiders - Sanguineti, Balestrini, Guglielmi, Eco, and others - and adversaries such as Pasolini, Calvino, and Moravia.
InThe New Avant-Garde in Italy- the first book in English to document the movement - John Picchione's objective is twofold: to provide a comprehensive analysis of the theoretical tenets that inform the works of theneoavanguardiaand to show how they are applied to the poetic practices of its authors. Theneoavanguardiacannot, Picchione argues, be defined as a movement with a unified program expressed in the form of manifestos or shared theoretical principles. It experiences irreconcilable internal conflicts that are explored as a split between two main blocs - one that is tied to the project of modernity, the other to post-modern aesthetic postures. This study suggests that some of the contentious views proposed by theneoavanguardiaanticipated a wide range of issues that continue to be significant and pressing to this day.
Contrary to the widespread notions of an irreconcilable conflict between the classical and avant-garde, the author argues that both dispute the basic idea of modernity: the idea of progress. The ...author concludes that it is necessary to repeatedly renew the debate of the "classics'" continuous referral to the authority of the past and the "moderns'" call for change, breakthrough, cessation. Art remains vital as long as it stays within the limits of that dispute, while with its eventual discontinuation, art would be forced to fade away. Otuda nema nikakve protivrecnosti u tome sto pojava avangardi ide ruku pod ruku sa rastom potrebe za klasicnim.
A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950 is the first work to consider all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only in aesthetic terms but in its ...cultural and political context.
Special Issue of Arts: “Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition” is focused on researching interactions of art and literature, of philosophy and visual poetry, and generally on ...theoretical aspects of cultural analysis.
Special Issue of Arts: “Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition” is focused on researching interactions of art and literature, of philosophy and visual poetry, and generally on ...theoretical aspects of cultural analysis.
In the decades following World War II, the creation and expansion of massive domestic markets and relatively stable economies allowed for mass consumption on an unprecedented scale, giving rise to ...the consumer society that exists today. Many avant-garde artists explored the nexus between consumption and aesthetics, questioning how consumerism affects how we perceive the world, place ourselves in it, and make sense of it via perception and emotion. Delirious Consumption focuses on the two largest cultural economies in Latin America, Mexico and Brazil, and analyzes how their artists and writers both embraced and resisted the spirit of development and progress that defines the consumer moment in late capitalism. Sergio Delgado Moya looks specifically at the work of David Alfaro Siqueiros, the Brazilian concrete poets, Octavio Paz, and Lygia Clark to determine how each of them arrived at forms of aesthetic production balanced between high modernism and consumer culture. He finds in their works a provocative positioning vis-à-vis urban commodity capitalism, an ambivalent position that takes an assured but flexible stance against commodification, alienation, and the politics of domination and inequality that defines market economies. In Delgado Moya’s view, these poets and artists appeal to uselessness, nonutility, and noncommunication—all markers of the aesthetic—while drawing on the terms proper to a world of consumption and consumer culture.
